Coming into Saturday night’s contest at Columbia, Penn’s sophomore point guard Sarah Bucar had made just 12 of 77 three pointers all season. Six Penn players came into the night having made at least 10 on the season, and only Bucar had a percentage below 30 percent, at 15.6 percent. Yet this Saturday, it was Bucar who downed the Lions’ hopes of a winning league record by sinking five 3-pointers and scoring a career-best 21 points.

This weekend, Columbia went against two of the three worst teams in the Ivy League in Penn and Princeton, but each team boasted a player who was one of the league’s top four scorers—Tiger senior forward Meagan Cowher and Quaker junior forward Carrie Biemer. The game plan for head coach Paul Nixon was to not waste bodies and energy stopping Cowher and Biemer but to shut down their teammates.

Friday night this plan worked to perfection.

Cowher labored at the free throw line, going one for six, but scored 25 points on 12 of 21 shooting. She kept Princeton in the game early on, even giving them a 12-9 lead by scoring six unanswered points in a two-minute span. With 7:34 to play in the first half, Cowher had scored 10 points and the Tigers trailed by only one.

Cowher could not keep pace with an entire team, however. As the Columbia offense picked up at the end of the first half, the Tiger offense fizzled and a 16-5 slump put the game out of reach.

Excluding Cowher, Princeton scored 32 points and was 11 for 31 from the field. The Tigers turned the ball over 18 times and only one player other than Cowher—freshman guard Krystal Hill—scored in double figures.

Saturday night seemed to open in much the same way. Biemer scored Penn’s first six points to give her team a 6-5 lead. Halfway through the period, Biemer had scored 15 of the Quakers’ 17 points and given them a 17-11 lead. This time, the Lions’ defense was not there to slow her teammates down.

“I think we were just scrambling a lot on defense,” senior Cate Taylor said. “We were not on the same page.”

Biemer did not score again in the first half but Penn maintained a seven-point lead. The second half began with something Columbia would see over and over again: Bucar sinking 3-pointers.

“In previous games she had success breaking her defenders down off the dribble,” Nixon said. “Tonight she had just two assists and was looking for her own shot. She kept taking pull-ups and making them.”

Down 13 with 14 minutes to play, the Lions erased a double-digit deficit for the fourth time in Ivy play, tying the game at 56. A layup by the Tigers’ freshman guard Kim Adams was followed a Bucar 3-pointer that pushed the lead to five. The Lions battled back with a 3-point play from Katrina Cragg but Bucar countered with yet another triple and the Lions never made up the deficit.

At the end of the night, Biemer finished with 22 points, but just seven after her opening outburst. Bucar scored 21 and Adams added 13 as the Quakers shot nearly 50 percent, excluding Biemer.

“We did a very bad job defensively,” Nixon said. “The thing that is disappointing is that this is an area I thought we had shored up. We did not play defense to our capability at any point tonight ... I give Penn credit though. They had a number of players step up and Bucar had a career game.”

For the Lions, Bucar’s performance and Saturday’s loss exemplify a season that exceeded expectations but was riddled with weekends of playing well one night and poorly another.